I know some of you went to presentation that Jabari Mahiri gave last year on digital literacy instruction and a point he made during his talk was that people -- teens included -- who are actively participating in on-line communities as part of their daily routines (e.g., Second Life) see themselves as having on-line identities that are not only equally "real" as IRL but that this next generation of technology users and consumers are developing and establishing a sense of identify which is much more dynamic/fluid.... Mahiri said a great deal more on this topic (and more coherently than I am trying to restate here) but I think there is a link here between what Mahiri was saying and what Lankshear and Knobel have suggested.
Of course, at this moment, I have neither my Lankshear and Knobel book or my file with my notes from Mahiri's lecture. I will try and gather those soon and take another stab at explaining my point soon. But I didn't want to forget about this in the hectic pace of finals, Thanksgiving, etc.
Here's what I think is interesting about the atoms and bits stuff--it's that we need BOTH. And that it's the atoms that give the bits value. Without the atoms bits would be meaningless. I'm thinking about Nick Negroponte's computer worth $1-2 million. The computer itself (atoms) would be worth maybe $1000-$1500, something like that, but with all of the information contained in that computer, it essentially becomes priceless. That information (bits), however, only exists because of the transaction between atoms and bits. That is, a human being needs to interact with the digital world in order to imbue it with any sort of meaning, let alone something of value. We still need humans and we still need atoms. We still need traditional literacies. And when we can make the two epistemologies converge, the possibilities are limitless.
ReplyDeleteI love it. Now can you draw/create a visual model that would illustrate the dynamic nature of this convergence? I am thinking of Kucer's model of the dimensions and wondering what it would look like if we made concerted effort to illustrate these two epistemologies in his theoretical model.
ReplyDelete